PC vendors looking to boost flagging sales by raiding the public purse can think again, after the Cabinet Office told MPs they would restrict their PCs to one per staffer and work their kit till they fell to bits
Tom Watson, Civil Service Minister at the Cabinet Office, outlined his department's efforts to reduce CO2 emissions …

efficiency savings

@steven

While not working in uk.gov, on my desk here I have a client desktop for access to their systems, my work laptop for access to my employers systems, and a netbook I use for personal stuff and network testing. Knowing how many systems and suppliers have been in and out of uk.gov, I'd be surprised if a significant number of staff didn't have 2 or 3 PC's. just to get into diverse systems!

@AC 14:11

The same way you should eat food grown close to home...

you should compute on a computer close to you.

Their idea about thin clients and a green computer room is ass backwards. Those gigabit Ethernet switches are some power hungry beasts. Mine generate a LOT of heat too which has to be air conditioned away. Concentrating all the equipment in one area requires air conditioning all year round whereas a PC on the desk actually reduces the need for heating the office during winter.

Replacing equipment only to be green will always be a net failure. The environmental cost to manufacture that new green PC will offset the minimal savings it will achieve - running a 5 year old machine and just adding 2G of RAM is way more responsible. Go out and get a new, low power 80G hard drive and it will offset the extra power of the RAM you add. You really only need a 20G HD in your workstation but you can't even buy them anymore.

There are just so many things wrong with the plan I don't know where to start.

Could be worse

In IBM land you have to buy your own laptop and pay fro your own broadband, however the upside is that you dont have to work from home and that the customer is the only one getting shafted. Imagine if the kitchen fitter showed and tried to screw in all the panels by hand or with one screwdriver cos B&Q told em that screwdrivers and hammers are pervasive and to supply their own kit.

So cheer up uk.gov you get payrises, bathplugs and free porn, we here in taxpayer land just take it up the wrong un with the wrong tools :)

The creaking old bureaucratic machine...

Government deserves the best

FFS I'm a Civil Servant and I want a decent machine so I can do multimedia powerpoints, monitor HD video sources, enable government through massively multiplayer online ga..., er I mean environments, all that kind of stuff. Government will be hidebound if we're not using the very latest quad-core processors too, as it helps government run more efficiently through multitasking.

Old machines = Green ???

Can keeping these old machines really be classed as being green? Pentium 4s glowing away all hours of the day?

Surely if they really want to be green they sell the old machines off to one of the many PC recycling companies (complete with all the private data still on the hard drive of course - this is UK gov after all) and then replace them with something like an atom based eeeBox that sip less than 35watts and cost £200.

Sure eeeboxs don't run vista, but business doesn't need/want vista. Sure they suck at games, well maybe they'll get more work done. Sure they don't have a CD/DVD drive, well good, cos that'll stop people burning or trying to install things off that they shouldn't!

I doubt the Cabinet Office IT equipment will last that long..

From what I gather Bonkers Brown likes to take out his temper on Nokia's and now Laser Printers. A few more bit's of bad news and 'der glorious leader' will have wrecked all of the IT equipment - that we paid for.

@first comment

Government requires air-gapped networks (they don't trust firewalls in many cases). This meant that at one gov. agency job, I had a desktop connected to the production network, another connected to the development network, and a laptop to access the systems for the outsourcing company I needed to book my time.

And if I had a need to use my own companies laptop (I was a contractor working through my own company for outsourcing company at the agency site) I would get out my laptop as well. I ended up using 2 KVM's with two keyboard, screens and mice, with the computers stacked up. Madness, but necessary to keep to the security rules.